Cult Actors, Deployed Cultishly

Tarantino has always enjoyed casting actors with a video-store legacy. In Reservoir Dogs, Old Hollywood tough guy Lawrence Tierney played the cut-from-granite crime lord Joe. Jackie Brown paired two actors from the counterculture era — blaxploitation star Pam Grier and Medium Cool leading man Robert Forster — in basically the only mature romances in the director’s filmography. Kill Bill featured martial arts legend Sonny Chiba, bathed in heavenly light as the legendary Hattori Hanzo. And in the trailer for Django Unchained, you can spot Franco Nero, the spaghetti western legend who played the original Django almost 50 years ago.